Mademoiselle Pearl
I
It really was an odd notion of mine to choose Mademoiselle Pearl for queen that particular evening.
Every year I went to eat my Twelfth Night dinner at the house of my old friend Chantal. My father, whose most intimate friend he was, had taken me there when I was a child. I had continued the custom, and I shall doubtless continue it as long as I live, and as long as there is a Chantal left in the world.
The Chantals, moreover, lead a strange life; they live in Paris as if they were living in Grasse, Yvetot, or Pont-à-Mousson.
They owned a small house with a garden, near the Observatory. There they lived in true provincial fashion. Of Paris, of the real Paris, they knew nothing and suspected nothing; they were far, very far away. Sometimes, however, they made a journey, a long journey. Madame Chantal went to the big stores, as they called it among themselves. And this is the manner of an expedition to the big stores.
Mademoiselle Pearl, who keeps the keys of the kitchen cupboards—for the linen cupboards are in the mistress’s own charge—Mademoiselle Pearl perceives that the sugar is coming to an end, that the preserves are quite finished, and that there’s nothing worth talking about left in the coffee-bag.
Then, put on her guard against famine, Madame Chantal passes the rest of the stores in review, and makes notes in her memorandum book. Then, when she has written down a quantity of figures, she first devotes herself to lengthy calculations, followed by lengthy discussions with Mademoiselle Pearl. They do at last come to an agreement and decide what amount of each article must be laid in for a three months’ supply: sugar, rice, prunes, coffee, preserves, tins of peas, beans, crab, salt and smoked fish, and so on and so forth.
After which they appoint a day for making the purchases, and set out together in a cab, a cab with a luggage rack on top, to a big grocery store over the river in the new quarters, with an air of great mystery, and return at dinnertime, worn out but still excited, jolting along in the carriage, its roof covered with packages and sacks like a removal van.
For the Chantals, all that part of Paris situated at the other side of the Seine constituted the new quarters, quarters inhabited by a strange noisy people, with the shakiest notions of honesty, who spent their days in dissipation, their nights feasting, and threw money out of the windows. From time to time, however, the young girls were taken to the theatre to the Opéra Comique or the Française, when the play was recommended by the paper Monsieur Chantal read.
The young girls are nineteen and seventeen years old today; they are two beautiful girls, tall and clear-skinned, very well trained, too well trained, so well trained that they attract no more attention than two pretty dolls. The idea never occurred to me to take any notice of them or to court the Chantal girls; I hardly dared speak to them, they seemed so unspotted from the world; I was almost afraid of offending against the proprieties in merely raising my hat.
The father himself is a charming man, very cultured, very frank, very friendly, but desirous of nothing so much as repose, quiet, and tranquillity, and mainly instrumental in mummifying his family into mere symbols of his will, living and having their being in a stagnant peacefulness. He read a good deal, from choice, and his emotions were easily stirred. His avoidance of all contact with life, common jostlings and violence had made his skin, his moral skin, very sensitive and delicate. The least thing moved and disturbed him, hurt him.
The Chantals had some friends, however, but friends admitted to their circle with many reserves, and chosen carefully from neighbouring families. They also exchanged two or three visits a year with relatives living at a distance.
As for me, I dine at their house on the fifteenth of August and on Twelfth Night. That is as sacred a duty to me as Easter communion to a Catholic.
On the fifteenth of August a few friends were asked, but on Twelfth Night I was the only guest and the only outsider.
II
Well, this year, as in every other year, I had gone to dine at the Chantals’ to celebrate Epiphany.
I embraced Monsieur Chantal, as I always did, Madame Chantal, and Mademoiselle Pearl, and I bowed deeply to Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. They questioned me about a thousand things, boulevard happenings, politics, our representatives, and what the public thought of affairs in Tonkin. Madame Chantal, a stout lady whose thoughts always impressed me as being square like blocks of stone, was wont to enunciate the following phrase at the end of every political discussion: “All this will produce a crop of misfortunes in the future.” Why do I always think that Madame Chantal’s thoughts are square? I don’t really know why; but my mind sees everything she says in this fashion: a square, a solid square with four symmetrical angles. There are other people whose thoughts always seems to me round and rolling like circles. As soon as they begin a phrase about something, out it rolls, running along, issuing in the shape of ten, twenty, fifty round thoughts, big ones and little ones, and I see them running behind each other out of sight over the edge of the sky. Other persons have pointed thoughts. … But this is somewhat irrelevant.
We sat down to table in the usual order, and dinner passed without anyone uttering a single memorable word. With the sweets, they brought in the Twelfth Night cake. Now, each year, Monsieur Chantal was king. Whether this was a series of chances or a domestic convention I don’t know, but invariably he found the lucky bean in his piece of cake, and he proclaimed Madame Chantal queen. So I was amazed to find in a mouthful of pastry something very hard that almost broke one of my teeth. I removed the object carefully from my mouth and I saw a tiny china doll no larger than a bean. Surprise made me exclaim: “Oh!” They all looked at me and Chantal clapped his hands and shouted: “Gaston’s got it. Gaston’s got it. Long live the king! Long live the king!”
The others caught up the chorus: “Long live the king!” And I blushed to my ears, as one often does for no reason whatever, in slightly ridiculous situations. I sat looking at my boots, holding the fragment of china between two fingers, forcing myself to laugh, and not knowing what to do or what to say, when Chantal went on: “Now he must choose a queen.”
I was overwhelmed. A thousand thoughts and speculations rushed across my mind in a second of time. Did they want me to choose out one of the Chantal girls? Was this a way of making me say which one I liked the better? Was it a gentle, delicate, almost unconscious feeler that the parents were putting out towards a possible marriage? The thought of marriage stalks all day and every day in families that possess marriageable daughters; it takes innumerable shapes and guises and adopts every possible means. I was suddenly dreadfully afraid of compromising myself, and extremely timid too, before the obstinately correct and rigid bearing of Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. To select one of them over the head of the other seemed to me as difficult as to choose between two drops of water; and I was horribly disturbed at the thought of committing myself to a path which would lead me to the altar willy-nilly, by gentle stages, and incidents as discreet, as insignificant, and as easy as this meaningless kingship.
But all at once I had an inspiration, and I proffered the symbolic little doll to Mademoiselle Pearl. At first everyone was surprised, then they must have appreciated my delicacy and discretion, for they applauded furiously, shouting: “Long live the queen! Long live the queen!”
As for the poor old maid, she was covered with confusion; she trembled and lifted a terrified face. “No … no … no …” she stammered; “not me … I implore you … not me … I implore you.”
At that, I looked at Mademoiselle Pearl for the first time in my life, and wondered what sort of a woman she was.
I was used to seeing her about this house, but only as you see old tapestried chairs in which you have been sitting since you were a child, without ever really noticing them. One day, you couldn’t say just why, because a ray of sunlight falls across the seat, you exclaim: “Why, this is a remarkable piece of furniture!” and you discover that the wood has been carved by an artist and that the tapestry is very uncommon. I had never noticed Mademoiselle Pearl.
She was part of the Chantal family, that was all; but what? What was her standing? She was a tall thin woman who kept herself very much in the background, but she wasn’t insignificant. They treated her in a friendly fashion, more intimately than a housekeeper, less so than a relation. I suddenly became aware now of various subtle shades of manner that I had never troubled about until this moment. Madame Chantal said: “Pearl.” The young girls: “Mademoiselle Pearl,” and Chantal never called her anything but “Mademoiselle,” with a slightly more respectful air perhaps.
I set myself to consider her. How old was she? Forty? Yes, forty. She was not old, this maiden lady, she made herself look old. I was suddenly struck by this obvious fact. She did her hair, dressed herself, and got herself up to look absurd, and in spite of it all she was not at all absurd. So innately graceful she was, simply and naturally graceful, though she did her best to obscure it and conceal it. What an odd creature she was, after all! Why hadn’t I paid more attention to her? She did her hair in the most grotesque way in ridiculous little grey curls; under this crowning glory of a middle-aged Madonna, she had a broad placid forehead, graven with two deep wrinkles, the wrinkles of some enduring sorrow, then two blue eyes, wide and gentle, so timid, so fearful, so humble, two blue eyes that were still simple, filled with girlish wonder and youthful emotions, and griefs endured in secret, softening her eyes and leaving then untroubled.
Her whole face was clear-cut and reserved, one of those faces grown worn without being ravaged or faded by the weariness and the fevered emotions of life.
What a pretty mouth, and what pretty teeth! But she seemed as if she dared not smile.
Abruptly, I began to compare her with Madame Chantal. Mademoiselle Pearl was undoubtedly the better of the two, a hundred times better, nobler, more dignified.
I was astounded by my discoveries. Champagne was poured out. I lifted my glass to the queen and drank her health with a pretty compliment. I could see that she wanted to hide her face in her napkin; then, when she dipped her lips in the translucent wine, everyone cried: “The queen’s drinking, the queen’s drinking!” At that she turned crimson and choked. They laughed; but I saw clearly that she was well liked in the house.
III
As soon as dinner was over, Chantal took me by the arm. It was the hour for his cigar, a sacred hour. When he was alone, he went out into the street to smoke; when he had someone to dinner, he took them to the billiard room, and he played as he smoked. This evening they had lit a fire in the billiard room, since it was Twelfth Night; and my old friend took his cue, a very slender cue which he chalked with great care; then he said:
“Now, sonny.”
He always spoke to me as if I were a little boy: I was twenty-five years old but he had known me since I was four.
I began to play; I made several cannons; I missed several more; but my head was filled with drifting thoughts of Mademoiselle Pearl, and I asked abruptly:
“Tell me, Monsieur Chantal, is Mademoiselle Pearl a relation of yours?”
He stopped playing, in astonishment, and stared at me.
“What, don’t you know? Didn’t you know Mademoiselle Pearl’s story?”
“Of course not.”
“Hasn’t your father ever told you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, well, that’s queer, upon my word, it’s queer. Oh, it’s quite an adventure.”
He was silent, and went on:
“And if you only knew how strange it is that you should ask me about it today, on Twelfth Night!”
“Why?”
“Why, indeed! Listen. It’s forty-one years ago, forty-one years this very day, the day of Epiphany. We were living then at Roüy-le-Tors, on the ramparts; but I must first tell you about the house, if you’re to understand the story properly. Roüy is built on a slope, or rather on a mound which thrusts out of a wide stretch of meadow land. We had there a house with a beautiful hanging garden, supported on the old ramparts. So that the house was in the town, on the street, while the garden hung over the plain. There was also a door opening from this garden on to the fields, at the bottom of a secret staircase which went down inside the thick masonry of the walls, just like a secret staircase in a romance. A road ran past this door, where a great bell hung, and the country people brought their stuff in this way, to save themselves going all the way round.
“Can you see it all? Well, this year, at Epiphany, it had been snowing for a week. It was like the end of the world. When we went out on to the ramparts to look out over the plain, the cold of that vast white countryside struck through to our very bones; it was white everywhere, icy cold, and gleaming like varnish. It really looked as if the good God had wrapped up the earth to carry it away to the lumber room of old worlds. It was rare and melancholy, I can tell you.
“We had all our family at home then, and we were a large family, a very large family: my father, my mother, my uncle and my aunt; my two brothers and my four cousins; they were pretty girls; I married the youngest. Of all that company, there are only three left alive: my wife, myself, and my sister-in-law at Marseilles. God, how a family dwindles away: it makes me shiver to think of it. I was fifteen years old then, and now I’m fifty-six.
“Well, we were going to eat our Twelfth Night dinner and we were very gay, very gay. Everybody was in the drawing room waiting for dinner, when my eldest brother, Jacques, took it into his head to say: ‘A dog’s been howling out in the fields for the last ten minutes; it must be some poor beast that’s got lost.’
“The words were hardly out of his mouth when the garden bell rang. It had a heavy clang like a church bell and reminded you of funerals. A shiver ran through the assembled company. My father called a servant and told him to go and see who was there. We waited in complete silence, we thought of the snow that lay over the whole countryside. When the man came back, he declared he had seen nothing. The dog was still howling: the howls never stopped, and came always from the same direction.
“We went in to dinner, but we were a little uneasy, especially the young ones. All went well until the joint was on the table, and then the bell began to ring again; it rang three times, three loud long clangs that sent a thrill to our very fingertips and stopped the breath in our throats. We sat staring at each other, our forks in the air, straining our ears, seized by fear of some supernatural horror.
“At last my mother said: ‘It’s very queer that they’ve been so long coming back; don’t go alone, Baptiste; one of the gentlemen will go with you.’
“My uncle François got up. He was as strong as Hercules, very proud of his great strength and afraid of nothing on earth. ‘Take a gun,’ my father advised him. ‘You don’t know what it might be.’
“But my uncle took nothing but a walking-stick, and went out at once with the servant.
“The rest of us waited there, shaking with terror and fright, neither eating nor speaking. My father tried to comfort us. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘it’ll be some beggar or some passerby lost in the snow. He rang once, and when the door wasn’t opened immediately, he made another attempt to find his road: he didn’t succeed and he’s come back to our door.’
“My uncle’s absence seemed to us to last an hour. He came back at last, furiously angry, and cursing:
“ ‘Not a thing, by God, it’s someone playing a trick. Nothing but that cursed dog howling a hundred yards beyond the walls. If I’d taken a gun, I’d have killed him to keep him quiet.’
“We went on with our dinner, but we were still very anxious; we were quite sure that we hadn’t heard the last of it; something was going to happen, the bell would ring again in a minute.
“It did ring, at the very moment when we were cutting the Epiphany cake. The men leaped to their feet as one man. My uncle François, who had been drinking champagne, swore that he was going to murder it, in such a wild rage that my mother and my aunt flung themselves on him to hold him back. My father was quite calm about it; he was slightly lame too (he dragged one leg since he had broken it in a fall from his horse), but now he declared that he must know what it was, and that he was going out. My brothers, who were eighteen and twenty years old, ran in search of their guns, and as no one was paying any attention to me, I grabbed a rook rifle and got ready to accompany the expedition myself.
“It set off at once. My father and my uncle led off, with Baptiste, who was carrying a lantern. My brothers Jacques and Paul followed, and I brought up the rear, in spite of the entreaties of my mother, who stayed behind in the doorway, with her sister and my cousins.
“Snow had been falling again during the last hour and it lay thick on the trees. The pines bent under the heavy ghostly covering, like white pyramids or enormous sugar loaves; the slighter shrubs, palely glimmering in the shadows, were only dimly visible through the grey curtain of small hurrying flakes. The snow was falling so thickly that you couldn’t see more than ten paces ahead. But the lantern threw a wide beam of light in front of us. When we began to descend the twisting staircase hollowed out of the wall, I was afraid, I can tell you. I thought someone was walking behind me and I’d be grabbed by the shoulder and carried off; I wanted to run home again, but as I’d have had to go back the whole length of the garden, I didn’t dare.
“I heard them opening the door on to the fields; then my uncle began to swear: ‘Blast him, he’s gone. If I’d only seen his shadow, I wouldn’t have missed him, the b⸺!’
“The look of the plain struck me with a sense of foreboding, or rather the feel of it in front of us, for we couldn’t see it; nothing was visible but a veil of snow hung from edge to edge of the world, above, below, in front of us, to left of us and right of us, everywhere.
“ ‘There, that’s the dog howling,’ added my uncle. ‘I’ll show him what I can do with a gun, I will. And that’ll be something done, at any rate.’
“But my father, who was a kindly man, answered: ‘We’d do better to go and look for the poor animal: he’s whining with hunger. The wretched beast is barking for help; he’s like a man shouting in distress. Come on.’
“We started off through the curtain, through the heavy ceaseless fall, through the foam that was filling the night and the air, moving, floating, falling; as it melted, it froze the flesh on our bones, froze it with a burning cold that sent a sharp swift stab of pain through the skin with each prick of the little white flakes.
“We sank to our knees in the soft cold feathery mass, and we had to lift our legs right up to get over the ground. The farther we advanced, the louder and clearer grew the howling of the dog. ‘There he is!’ cried my uncle. We stopped to observe him, like prudent campaigners coming upon the enemy at night.
“I couldn’t see anything; then I came up with the others and I saw him; he was a terrifying and fantastic object, that dog, a great black dog, a shaggy sheepdog with a head like a wolf, standing erect on his four feet at the far end of the long track of light that the lantern flung out across the snow. He didn’t move; he stared at us with never a sound.
“ ‘It’s queer he doesn’t rush at us or away from us,’ said my uncle. ‘I’ve the greatest mind to stretch him out with a shot.’
“ ‘No,’ my father said decidedly, ‘we must catch him.’
“ ‘But he’s not alone,’ my brother Jacques added. ‘He has something beside him.’
“He actually had something behind him, something grey and indistinguishable. We began to walk cautiously towards him.
“Seeing us draw near, the dog sat down on his haunches. He didn’t look vicious. He seemed, on the contrary, pleased that he had succeeded in attracting someone’s attention.
“My father went right up to him and patted him. The dog licked his hands; and we saw that he was fastened to the wheel of a small carriage, a sort of toy carriage wrapped all round in three or four woollen coverings. We lifted the wrappings carefully; Baptiste held his lantern against the opening of the carriage—which was like a kennel on wheels—and we saw inside a tiny sleeping child.
“We were so astonished that we couldn’t get out a single word. My father was the first to recover: he was warmhearted and somewhat emotional; he placed his hand on the top of the carriage and said: ‘Poor deserted thing, you shall belong to us.’ And he ordered my brother Jacques to wheel our find in front of us.
“ ‘A love-child,’ my father added, ‘whose poor mother came and knocked at my door on Epiphany night, in memory of the Christ-child.’
“He stood still again, and shouted into the darkness four times, at the top of his voice, to all the four corners of the heavens: ‘We have got him safe.’ Then he rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder and murmured: ‘Suppose you’d fired at the dog, François?’
“My uncle said nothing, but crossed himself earnestly in the darkness; he was very devout, for all his swaggering ways.
“We had loosed the dog, who followed us.
“Upon my word, our return to the house was a pretty sight. At first we had great difficulty in getting the carriage up the rampart staircase; we succeeded at last, however, and wheeled it right into the hall.
“How comically surprised and delighted and bewildered mamma was! And my poor little cousins (the youngest was six) were like four hens round a nest. At last we lifted the child, still sleeping, from its carriage. It was a girl about six weeks old. And in her clothes we found ten thousand francs in gold, yes, ten thousand francs, which papa invested to bring her in a dowry. So she wasn’t the child of poor parents … she may have been the child of a gentleman by a respectable young girl belonging to the town, or even … we made innumerable speculations, and we never knew anything … except that … never a thing … never a thing. … Even the dog wasn’t known to anyone. He didn’t belong to the district. In any event, the man or woman who had rung three times at our door knew very well what sort of people my parents were, when they chose them for their child.
“And that’s how Mademoiselle Pearl found her way into the Chantal house when she was six weeks old.
“It was later that she got the name of Mademoiselle Pearl. She was first christened Marie Simone Claire, Claire serving as her surname.
“We certainly made a quaint entry into the dining room with the tiny wide-awake creature, looking round her at the people and the lights, with wondering troubled blue eyes.
“We sat down at the table again, and the cake was cut. I was king and I chose Mademoiselle Pearl for queen, as you did just now. She hadn’t any idea that day what a compliment we were paying her.
“Well, the child was adopted, and brought up as one of the family. She grew up: years passed. She was a charming, gentle, obedient girl. Everyone loved her and she would have been shamefully spoiled if my mother had not seen to it that she wasn’t.
“My mother had a lively sense of what was fitting and a proper reverence for caste. She consented to treat little Claire as she did her own children, but she was none the less insistent that the distance between us should be definitely marked and the position clearly laid down.
“So as soon as the child was old enough to understand, she told her how she had been found, and very gently, tenderly even, she made the little girl realise that she was only an adopted member of the Chantal family, belonging to them but really no kin at all.
“Claire realised the state of affairs with an intelligence beyond her years and an instinctive wisdom that surprised us all; and she was quick to take and keep the place allotted to her, with so much tact, grace, and courtesy that she brought tears to my father’s eyes.
“My mother herself was so touched by the passionate gratitude and timid devotion of this adorable and tenderhearted little thing that she began to call her ‘My daughter.’ Sometimes, when the young girl had shown herself more than commonly sweet-natured and delicate, my mother pushed her glasses on to her forehead, as she always did when much moved, and repeated: ‘The child’s a pearl, a real pearl.’ The name stuck to little Claire: she became Mademoiselle Pearl for all of us from that time and for always.”
IV
Monsieur Chantal was silent. He was sitting on the billiard table, swinging his feet; his left hand fiddled with a ball and in his right hand he crumpled the woollen rag we called “the chalk rag,” and used for rubbing out the score on the slate. A little flushed, his voice muffled, he was speaking to himself now, lost in his memories, dreaming happily through early scenes and old happenings stirring in his thoughts, as a man dreams when he walks through old gardens where he grew up, and where each tree, each path, each plant, the prickly holly whose plump red berries crumble between his fingers, evoke at every step some little incident of his past life, the little insignificant delicious incidents that are the very heart, the very stuff of life.
I stood facing him, propped against the wall, leaning my hands on my useless billiard cue.
After a moment’s pause he went on: “God, how sweet pretty she was at eighteen—and graceful—and perfect! Oh, what a pretty—pretty—pretty—sweet—gay—and charming girl! She had such eyes … blue eyes … limpid … limpid … clear … I’ve never seen any like them … never.”
Again he was silent. “Why didn’t she marry?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me: he answered the careless word “marry.”
“Why? why? She didn’t want to … didn’t want to. She had a dowry of ninety thousand francs too, and she had several offers … she didn’t want to marry. She seemed sad during those years. It was just at the time I married my cousin, little Charlotte, my wife, to whom I’d been engaged for six years.”
I looked at Monsieur Chantal and thought that I could see into his mind, and that I’d come suddenly upon the humble cruel tragedy of a heart at once honourable, upright, and pure, that I’d seen into the secret unknown depths of a heart that no one had really understood, not even the resigned and silent victims of its dictates.
Pricked by a sudden savage curiosity, I said deliberately:
“Surely you ought to have married her, Monsieur Chantal?”
He started, stared at me, and said:
“Me? Marry whom?”
“Mademoiselle Pearl.”
“But why?”
“Because you loved her more than you loved your cousin.”
He stared at me with strange, wide, bewildered eyes, then stammered:
“I loved her? … I? … how? What are you talking about?”
“It’s obvious, surely? Moreover, it was on her account that you delayed so long before marrying the cousin who waited six years for you.”
The cue fell from his left hand, and he seized the chalk rag in both hands and, covering his face with it, began to sob into its folds. He wept in a despairing and ridiculous fashion, dripping water from eyes and nose and mouth all at once like a squeezed sponge. He coughed, spat, and blew his nose on the chalk rag, dried his eyes, choked, and overflowed again from every opening in his face, making a noise in his throat like a man gargling.
Terrified and ashamed, I wanted to run away, and I did not know what to say, or do, or try to do.
And suddenly Madame Chantal’s voice floated up the staircase: “Have you nearly finished your smoke?”
I opened the door and called: “Yes, ma’am, we’re coming down.”
Then I flung myself on her husband, seized him by the elbows, and said: “Monsieur Chantal, Chantal my friend, listen to me; your wife is calling you, pull yourself together, pull yourself together, we must go downstairs; pull yourself together.”
“Yes … yes …” he babbled. “I’m coming … poor girl … I’m coming … tell her I’m just coming.”
And he began carefully drying his face on the rag that had been used to rub the score off the slate for two or three years; then he emerged, white and red in streaks, his forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin dabbled with chalk, his eyes swollen and still full of tears.
I took his hands and led him towards his bedroom, murmuring: “I beg your pardon, I humbly beg your pardon, Monsieur Chantal, for hurting you like this … but … I didn’t know … you … you see.”
He shook my hand. “Yes … yes … we all have our awkward moments.”
Then he plunged his face in his basin. When he emerged, he was still hardly presentable, but I thought of a little ruse. He was very disturbed when he looked at himself in the glass, so I said “You need only tell her you’ve got a speck of dust in your eye, and you can cry in front of everyone as long as you like.”
He did at last go down, rubbing his eyes with his handkerchief. They were all very concerned; everyone wanted to look for the speck of dust, which no one could find, and they related similar cases when it had become necessary to call in a doctor.
I had betaken myself to Mademoiselle Pearl’s side and I looked at her, tormented by a burning curiosity, a curiosity that became positively painful. She really must have been pretty, with her quiet eyes, so big, so untroubled, so wide that you’d have thought they were never closed as ordinary eyes are. Her dress was a little absurd, a real old maid’s dress, that hid her real charm but could not make her look graceless.
I thought that I could see into her mind as I had just seen into the mind of Monsieur Chantal, that I could see every hidden corner of this simple humble life, spent in the service of others; but I felt a sudden impulse to speak, an aching persistent impulse to question her, to find out if she too had loved, if she had loved him; if like him she had endured the same long bitter secret sorrow, unseen, unknown, unguessed of all, indulged only at night in the solitude and darkness of her room. I looked at her, I saw her heart beating under her high-necked frock, and I wondered if night after night this gentle wide-eyed creature had stifled her moans in the depths of a pillow wet with her tears, sobbing, her body torn with long shudders, lying there in the fevered solitude of a burning bed.
And like a child breaking a plaything to see inside it, I whispered to her: “If you had seen Monsieur Chantal crying just now, you would have been sorry for him.”
She trembled: “What, has he been crying?”
“Yes, he’s been crying.”
“Why?”
She was very agitated. I answered:
“About you.”
“About me?”
“Yes. He told me how he loved you years ago, and what it had cost him to marry his wife instead of you.”
Her pale face seemed to grow a little longer; her wide quiet eyes shut suddenly, so swiftly that they seemed closed never to open again. She slipped from her chair to the floor and sank slowly, softly, across it, like a falling scarf.
“Help, quick, quick, help!” I cried. “Mademoiselle Pearl is ill.”
Madame Chantal and her daughters rushed to help her, and while they were bringing water, a napkin, vinegar, I sought my hat and hurried away.
I walked away with great strides, sick at heart and my mind full of remorse and regret. And at the same time I was almost happy; it seemed to me that I had done a praiseworthy and necessary action.
Was I wrong or right? I asked myself. They had hidden their secret knowledge in their hearts like a bullet in a healed wound. Wouldn’t they be happier now? It was too late for their grief to torture them again, and soon enough for them to recall it with a tender pitying emotion.
And perhaps some evening in the coming spring, stirred by moonlight falling through the branches across the grass under their feet, they will draw close to one another and clasp each other’s hands, remembering all their cruel hidden suffering. And perhaps, too, the brief embrace will wake in their blood a faint thrill of the ecstasy they have never known, and in the hearts of these two dead that for one moment are alive, it will stir the swift divine madness, the wild joy that turns the least trembling of true lovers into a deeper happiness than other men can ever know in all their life.